Making Nice

The Dixie Chicks’ new album.

Though country music is beloved by conservatives—its songs mention God as often as they do whiskey—it isn’t a partisan genre; it’s political by nature. Garth Brooks defended gay rights in the song “We Shall Be Free,” in 1992, at the height of his career; Toby Keith’s 2002 hit “Courtesy of the Red, White, and Blue (The Angry American)” crammed a year’s worth of jingoist anger and fear into three and a quarter minutes, culminating in the phrase “ ’Cause we’ll put a boot in your ass, it’s the American way.” In 2003, ten days before the invasion of Iraq, Natalie Maines, the lead singer of the Texan band the Dixie Chicks, one of the biggest-selling acts in the history of country music, told an audience in London, “Just so you know, we’re ashamed the President of the United States is from Texas.” The remark scandalized many Americans, but it was in keeping with country music’s tradition of unvarnished opinions.

Soon after the show, the Dixie Chicks—Maines and two skilled musicians, the sisters Emily Robison (on banjo) and Martie Maguire (on fiddle)—began receiving death threats. Radio stations dropped their songs, and, in a quaint throwback to the days when John Lennon claimed that the Beatles were “more popular than Jesus,” the group’s CDs were stomped to bits and bulldozed. Keith, one of country’s most popular male singers, whose song “Angry American” Maines had called “ignorant,” performed in front of a photo manipulated to show her entwined with Saddam Hussein. Maines responded by appearing at a music-awards ceremony in a T-shirt bearing the unmysterious abbreviation “F.U.T.K.”

In some quarters, this kind of sparring is called conversation, and before 2003 the Dixie Chicks’ natural candor—reflected in sassy songs about women who don’t suffer wishy-washy men—had worked to their advantage. As one track from their album “Wide Open Spaces” put it, “If you’re gonna say goodbye, don’t take all day and night, let ’er rip—let it fly.” One of the songs that transformed the band from country big to plain old big was the 1999 single “Goodbye Earl,” a comic track about finishing off an abusive husband with a plate of poisoned black-eyed peas. Four years later, in London, after Maines made her infamous remark, the Dixie Chicks played “Travelin’ Soldier,” a song about a G.I. who writes love letters to a girl he met just before he left home for Vietnam—where he dies. In March, the group released “Not Ready to Make Nice,” the first single from their new album, “Taking the Long Way.” The song is being promoted as a response to what the Dixie Chicks refer to as “the incident,” and it is presumably intended as a sign that the new album, which will be released next month, aims to be as cheeky as their earlier work.

“Not Ready to Make Nice” alternates sparse verses in a minor key with a bumptious chorus, in which Maines doubles the pace of her singing, neatly suggesting a rising temper: “It’s too late to make it right, I probably wouldn’t if I could, ’cause I’m mad as hell, can’t bring myself to do what it is you think I should.” The song would be a fine riposte to a bossy lover. But why isn’t Maines singing about Iraq?

Even before the incident, the Dixie Chicks had started to stray from mainstream country. In 2001, they got into a legal dispute with Sony, their record label, and before the case was resolved they recorded an album’s worth of acoustic bluegrass numbers, unsure how, or whether, the songs would be released. In 2002, after settling with the Chicks, Sony released the album, “Home,” and it yielded the highest-charting singles of the group’s career. The biggest hit, though, wasn’t country or bluegrass; it was a cover of Fleetwood Mac’s “Landslide,” a mournful ballad about overwhelming love. The rest of the songs from “Home” more closely resembled the traditional bluegrass numbers on the unexpectedly popular soundtrack from “O Brother, Where Art Thou?” than they did any of the material on the band’s previous two blockbusters, “Wide Open Spaces” and “Fly.”

Like the majority of country albums, these were written by, or co-written with, professional songwriters (eighteen people are credited on “Fly”) and performed with the help of studio musicians. Maines’s twangy bazooka of a voice set the band apart, and she presented herself as a confident woman battling social convention. “Ready to Run,” from “Fly” (1999), for example, depicts domesticity as imprisonment: “When my momma says I look good in white, I’m gonna be ready this time, oh yeah—ready, ready, ready, ready. . . ready to run.” Even “Long Time Gone,” the first single from “Home,” though stripped of the zoomy drums and guitars of the earlier records, was a defiant song about a woman who leaves her family’s home (and possibly shacks up with another woman, depending on how you interpret the pronouns).

The bluegrass music on “Home” implied that the Dixie Chicks were ambivalent about the sound that had made them stars; “Taking the Long Way” makes it explicit that they want to change in a fundamental way. The album was produced by Rick Rubin, who made his reputation working with hip-hop and hard-rock acts, and almost all of the backing musicians are members of famous rock bands, including Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers and the Red Hot Chili Peppers. Most of the songs are played on acoustic instruments, which accounts for the album’s relaxed pace and airy sound; the press release plausibly cites soft rock like the Eagles and the Mamas and the Papas as inspirations.

The most telling difference, though, is that the Dixie Chicks are listed as co-writers on all of the songs. (Some of their collaborators are Keb’ Mo’, Sheryl Crow, and Gary Louris, of the country-rock band the Jayhawks.) This desire for control is understandable, but it requires the band to match the combined efforts of a team of people who have spent their careers writing country music—the plainspoken, almost always funny, storytelling songs that have made Nashville pop such a consistent pleasure for the past fifteen years.

Few pop performers sing in harmony as sweetly as do Maines, Robison, and Maguire. On the album’s charming opener, “The Long Way Around,” the trio ably mimics the spun-sugar vocals of Fleetwood Mac, while Maines reprises the familiar Dixie Chicks theme of leaving a small town for big things: she sings about choosing not to be like her friends who “married their high-school boyfriends,” deciding instead to tour with a band “in a pink R.V. with stars on the ceiling.” On the whole, however, “Taking the Long Way” is long on formal beauty and short on concrete details and taut one-liners. Why do the lyrics for “I Hope,” a weak-kneed gospel song that is one of the album’s only musically timid numbers, touch on spousal abuse only to conclude that “it’s O.K. for us to disagree, we can work it out lovingly”? Why is “So Hard,” a song about infertility, so vague? (“It felt like a given, something a woman’s born to do, a natural ambition to see a reflection of me and you.”)

It’s a shame that the Chicks’ words fail them, because they get so much else right. “Baby Hold On” makes up for obvious lyrics about an aging romance (“we might never live those days gone by, but we can try”) with a plaintive verse and a leaping chorus. The chord changes in “Silent House,” which describes a house that lacks a permanent occupant, move in a slow arc against harmonized vocals that shift subtly between minor and major passages. For lesser artists, an album this harmonically confident would be a coup. But in the case of the Dixie Chicks it’s disappointing, like watching Muhammad Ali hurt a man’s feelings.

What’s missing from “Not Ready to Make Nice” and the album’s other lovely but overly impressionistic songs are the straightforward lyrics of a professional Nashville songwriter like Dennis Linde, who wrote “Goodbye Earl” for the Chicks (as well as “Burning Love” for Elvis Presley in 1972). Linde’s song presses specifics into quick couplets: Wanda and Mary Anne were “the best of friends all through their high-school days, both members of the 4-H club, both active in the F.F.A.,” until Wanda’s husband, Earl, walked “right through that restraining order and put her in intensive care.” Mary Anne flies in from Atlanta and “she held Wanda’s hand as they worked out a plan and it didn’t take them long to decide that Earl had to die.” Now, those are fighting words. ♦

Sasha Frere-Jones worked at The New Yorker as a staff writer and pop-music critic for ten years, beginning in 2004.